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September 20, 2007
Our Evolving Brains (Historical, Scientific, Religious)
The major area of disagreement between deists and atheists is usually considered to be how everything came to be: was the universe created by the unknowable power of an omnipotent God, or wasn't it? An indication of the frustration inevitably attending most attempts to answer that question is that a bit more reflection allows it to be asked differently: assuming there is an unknowable and omnipotent creative force; is it humanoid, accessible, and judgmental of human behavior, as most deists insist?
Or is it so remote and unknowable as to be both optional and a matter of relative indifference— the atheist position.
The cognitive reality revealed by that simple change in focus is that the anwsers to complex questions depend largely on how they are framed, a consideration which, in turn, illustrates the human bias that scientific formulations nominally seek to eliminate and religious constructions inevitably embrace, or why that twain has such trouble meetimg.
Recorded history confirms that belief in an outside creative force was nearly universal in the early human societies that left written records; we now also know from a variety of other sources that the literate human cultures once considered “ancient” were actually quite recent. From still other sources, we know that the emergence of Homo sapiens as a discrete species was also comparatively recent on the evolutionary time scale. In additikon, our own planet, essential as it was to our evolution, is relaively small compared to others in our solar system, itself a minor constituent of a relatively small galaxy. Finally, we know that countless other galaxies are being formed from billions of stars like our Sun.
In other words, the revolutionary way of thinking about the universe enabled by modern empirical science— which began to emerge in Europe only about six centuries ago— has revealed it as much larger and more detailed than could possibly have been imagined by earlier humans ("ancients") whose otherwise accurate observations had been restricted to their naked eyes. Also; the fiercely unresolved struggle now known as the War on Terror" isn't between deists and atheists; it's between rival religious beliefs and more akin to the Crusades.
Unnderstanding the role of science in the ambient confusion is helped by considering that it depended on three key inventions over the last six hundred years. First, Gutenberg’s printing press democratized literacy and thus enabled much greater participation in scholarship. Next, Galileo’s telescope, confirmed the speculations of Copernicus and began demonstrating the vastness of space. Finally; the microscope which, whether credited to the Jansenns or to Van Leeuwenhoek, allowed discovery of another dimension; one filled with life but, as yet, incompletely understood.
Although our human ancestors had domesticated animals and thought of them as qualitatively different from themselves, we now know we share a mutual dependency on DNA for replication and are part of the same evolutionary process that produced the other fauna and flora essential to our survival.
One way humans are different from other mammals is that, unlike the physical attributes which enabled other predators to dominate regional food chains in earlier times, we haven’t relied on enhanced strength, speed, teeth, or claws. Our major competitive mechanism has been the cognitive ability of our brains, which required the parallel evolution of several other characteristics: bipedalism, allowing us to be upright and freeing our upper extremities to take advantage of opposable thumbs so useful in the fabrication of tools. Also, the complex modifications of our respiratory tract so important to language function and necessary for communicating ideas, working in groups, and educatating our progeny.
All of which, is a long prelude to a consideration of two other phenomena which are essential, but usually overflooked, characteristics of human behavior: our need to believe in abstract ideas, and our talent for bureaucracy.
We can also see that the evolutionary process that produced the brain as a organ and enabled its owners to become the dominant predators on the planet, has occurred in two phases. The first was physical and is still going on; but so slowly that it’s not likely that either our brain's physical tructure or neurochemical function have changed much in the thousands of years since the last Ice Age.
However, the much more recent process of cultural evolution is now in high gear and accelerating; it began among among the scattered human populations that had survived the last Ice Age and could have had little knowledge of each other. Now, since the discoveries of Agriculture and Science have resulted in a functionally smaller and more densely populated planet, our individual difficulties in dealing with a new world can also be seen as increasingly important. The notion that the intellectual and emotional environment in which humans interact would remain unaffected by modern developments; or that efforts to treat symptoms generated by those developments could be arbitrarily suppressed and/or punished without severe consequences to the society committed to such a policy are but two of the drug war's many absurd assumptions.
That conservative demagogues are now preoccupied with inflicting those absurd beliefs on everyone is perhaps the major lesson to be gleaned from the disgraceful federal treatment of those California medical marijuana users and suppliers who have fallen into their clutches.
It's a pity their leadership has yet to figure that out...
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at September 20, 2007 10:31 PM